by Mary Logue
At night, in her double bed, he would curl up on the pillow next to her head. He would fall asleep before she did, but in the morning when she woke, his eyes would be fastened on her face.
“What do you think, Snooper?” she asked.
The little dog wagged its tail, pounding it against the couch cushions.
“I should make you a little rug. Something for you to lie on that would be your very own.”
He wagged again and this time gave a small yelp.
She laughed. “You like that idea.”
She was more than half done with the rug, and it was turning out nicer than she had hoped. A green stripe and then a red stripe. She was making it two and a half feet wide and the same length—a square to fit under a small tree.
She remembered the first Christmas after she had fallen in love with Jack. She had thought he was everything. They had opened presents early Christmas morning. He had given her a pair of earrings, boasting that even though they were zirconium they still cost him fifty bucks, and she had given him a CD that had the song “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” on it. It was their song. She had also knit him a scarf, which he said was too precious to wear. She thought he didn’t like the way it looked on him but was afraid to tell her. He had gotten through that phase fast.
She also remembered that they had made love later on that day. He had made her put on her earrings, and then he had touched her all over in places she had never been touched before. She had the thought that she wasn’t sure if she was in love with him, but she knew that her body was in love with his. She had been only fifteen.
Her hands moved on their own over the rug, and her thoughts could go where they wanted to. But she had to quit thinking about Jack. He wasn’t who he once had been. He hadn’t been that man for many years. She had put up with him for far too long.
Then there was a knock on the door. She froze. Only one more day, and she would be gone. Please don’t let it be Jack. She couldn’t let him see the dog. He might hurt it—he was mean to animals. She scooped up Snooper and put him in a crate that she had gotten from work, then she gave him a treat and hid him in the back of her closet, telling him to be quiet.
Whoever it was continued to bang on the door. She smoothed her hair down and peeked out the small window at the top of the door. A woman. Then she recognized the woman. It was the deputy woman, Claire.
For an instant Stephanie fantasized about telling her everything, pleading with her to help, but then she remembered what had happened last time. She had sworn never again. She would take care of herself. The police never listened.
She opened the door.
Claire tucked the Polaroid of the red rag in her purse before she left her house. She had stopped home before she dropped in on Stephanie, feeling that this was an instance when her uniform would not serve her well. She had changed into a sweatshirt and jeans. Let Stephanie see that she was just another woman, that she might understand what she had gone through—maybe that way she would open up and talk, telling Claire what had happened to Buck.
As Claire drove over to Stephanie’s house, she felt very odd to be stopping over at a neighbor’s to see if she had killed someone. When she had worked in Minneapolis, she had never interrogated anyone she had known personally. She felt very uncomfortable and wondered if she should have come with Scott or Billy. Made it more official.
When Stephanie opened the door, she flung it wide as if she had nothing to hide. “Oh, hi,” she said as if she had been expecting someone else.
“I need to talk to you.”
Stephanie didn’t say anything, but continued to stare at her. Claire stared back, surprised by how small the woman was. Claire put her height at under five-foot-three and wouldn’t have guessed she weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. The bruises on her face had faded until they looked like a smear of makeup in the wrong spot.
“Just a few questions,” Claire added.
“That sounds ominous.”
Stephanie’s use of the word surprised Claire. It stopped her for a moment. What did she know of this woman? What had she presupposed? She needed to start over again.
“I don’t mean it to sound that way. I guess I just thought it was time we talked. I’m Claire Watkins. I work for the sheriff’s department.”
“I know who you are. Come on in.” Stephanie’s shoulders dropped, and she stepped out of the way, allowing Claire to come into her house.
Claire followed her into the living room. A 1960s-style sofa with a teak frame and what looked like the original fabric sat up against the wall.
“I like the sofa,” Claire said before she sat down on it.
“Salvation Army. Thirty bucks.”
“These sixties pieces are getting trendy again.”
Stephanie ran her hand over the fabric and said, “Reminded me of one we had when I was a kid.”
Then Claire looked at the work set on the tiled coffee table. Stephanie was weaving a green-and-red rag rug. The red strips looked like a match to the one that had been found tied around Buck’s neck.
“I love your rugs,” Claire said and then felt disingenuous saying it. But she did love Stephanie’s rugs. How to be both a neighbor and a cop at the same time? “I do a little quilting. Is weaving hard?”
Stephanie smiled for the first time. She looked Claire full in the face. “That isn’t why you came here.”
Claire said honestly, “I wish it was. It’s about Buck.”
Stephanie’s head dropped and she nodded. “I thought so.”
“Do you have the dog?”
“Oh, the dog.” Stephanie stood up and ran out of the room, returning a minute later with a small, fluffy dog under her arm. “I forgot about him. I had put him in his crate.”
“What kind of dog is he?” Claire asked, looking at the tawny powder puff with deep brown eyes.
“A Pomeranian.”
“What’s his name?”
“Snooper.”
“Kind of a silly name.”
Stephanie looked at Claire and nodded. “Yes, I’ve been thinking of changing it. Maybe just adding on to it. Gentleman. Gentleman Snooper. It would suit him better. He has more manners than most men I meet.”
Claire decided she better get down to it and ask Stephanie some serious questions. As she was reaching into her purse, Stephanie stood up.
“I could make some coffee?”
“No, that won’t be necessary.”
“I don’t have anything to eat in the house.” Stephanie looked toward the kitchen.
“Really. I need to ask a few things about Buck. Sit down.”
Stephanie did as she was told.
Claire held out the Polaroid of the red rag. It was taken against a white sheet and stood out well. “Do you recognize this?”
“What kind of question is that?” Stephanie pointed at the rug she was weaving. “A trick question? Of course I do. It looks like one of my strips of red cloth. Why?”
“No trick, Stephanie. Calm down. It was found in Buck’s car. When we dragged it out of the lake.” Claire had decided she would tell her no more than that.
Stephanie squinted her face. “His car? Let me think. I know what might have happened. I think I brought my weaving over to his house one night, and I bet that piece fell out of my bag.”
Not a bad explanation. Claire went on. “Do you know what happened to Buck? How he died?”
“Just what everyone knows. His car fell through the ice. I assume he drowned.”
“Did you see him that night?”
Stephanie answered quickly—maybe too quickly. “No. We had talked of meeting at the bar, but when I got there, only Snooper was still there. Buck was already gone. I was surprised.”
“Was he meeting anyone else there?”
Hesitation. “No, not that I know of. He didn’t say anything to me.”
“What was your relationship with Buck?”
Stephanie’s eyes filled with tears, but she blinked them back. “I guess
you might have called us girlfriend and boyfriend. I don’t know. We were more friends as far as I was concerned.”
“Stephanie, it looks like someone tied Buck into his car and then drove it out onto the ice. It looks like he was murdered.”
Stephanie didn’t react. She stroked the dog who was leaning into her lap. “I wondered.”
“You don’t seem surprised?”
“Because Buck would never have gone out on that ice. He knew better. He wasn’t dumb like that. He knew that lake better than anyone I know.”
“Do you know anyone who might have wanted to hurt him?”
Stephanie snorted. “Buck? No way. He might have annoyed some people, but he was too nice for his own good.”
“Did you have anything to do with what happened to Buck?”
Stephanie’s eyes widened. It wasn’t much, but Claire had been watching for it. “No. I don’t think so. Not that I know of.”
“How could you not know?”
“Maybe somebody at work liked me. Maybe someone had a grudge against Buck. I don’t know.”
Claire tried a different tack. “Who beat you last week? Was it Buck?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Buck literally wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
“Then who did it?”
“My own clumsiness. I admit it looked bad, but it all happened when I fell down my front stairs. They had gotten icy in the night.”
“Stephanie, I think you need to tell me what really happened.”
Stephanie looked at Claire and then said a little more loudly, “Why are you asking all these questions? Do you think Buck beat me up, so I killed him?”
Claire sat still.
“You do, don’t you? Why the hell would I do that? Why would I kill the nicest man I’ve ever known? Can you answer me that?”
Claire watched her.
Stephanie picked up Snooper and held the dog up to her face, burying her face in the dog’s fur. Her shoulders shook as she started to cry. Then she lowered the dog into her lap and looked at Claire with tears flowing down her face. “Why would I take his dog home with me?”
“A good question.”
Stephanie gave a squeak of a laugh. “Maybe that’s why I killed him—so that I could get the dog.”
“Don’t worry.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Rich wished he could clap them back.
Claire reacted the way he thought she might. She stopped pacing in the middle of his kitchen and snapped at him, “Don’t tell me to not worry. I hate it when someone does that to me.”
“Fine.”
“Fine?” She burst out laughing and sat down next to him. “Thanks for that. I’m being a jerk, aren’t I?”
“I hadn’t noticed. Let’s see if I’ve got this right. You went over to a neighbor woman’s house who you suspect has been assaulted recently and whose rag rugs you like, and you asked her if she had killed her boyfriend, and she said no, and now you feel shitty for having accused her.”
“She has his dog, for God’s sake.”
“I’m on your side. I’m on her side.”
“I think she liked this guy. I don’t think she was in love with him, but I think she thought it might happen. From everything I know about him, he was a nice man. And now he’s dead. But I do think she knows something she’s not telling me. I think she might have an idea who did it.”
Rich watched her work through all this.
“But what if I’m wrong? What if he beat her, and she killed him?”
“Don’t you think you will figure that out—that something will give it away?”
“God, I hope so. But someone did beat her up. She tried to tell me that she slipped on the ice, but you don’t land on your face and have bruises around your eyes if you fall. Only another person pounding you leaves marks like that. How am I going to get her to talk to me about it?”
“Try again.”
“You’re right. Persist, as my father would say.”
Rich decided to change the subject. “You ready for us all tomorrow?”
“I think so. It will feel weird to me not to be working on this case over the holiday, but nothing will change, and it will give the crime lab more time to analyze what they’ve got. The house is pretty clean. Is your mother fastidious?”
“She keeps her house clean, but not always neat. Anyway, don’t worry about what she’ll think.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Both my parents are gone, so you will never be faced with this.”
Rich could tell she was spoiling for a fight. He didn’t want to go there. “What would you like me to say?”
Claire thought about it for a moment. “That your mother will love me.”
He took her hand and held it to reassure her. “I can’t promise that, but I know she will like you.”
“That everything will go off like clockwork.”
He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it gently. “Better than that, we will all have a good time.”
“That I will find who killed Buck and I will find them fast, before anything else happens. I’m worried about Stephanie.”
“Does she seem scared?”
Claire thought back to Stephanie. “Numb would be a better word. When I told her that we thought Buck had been killed, she didn’t seem surprised. More resigned. Like she’d been waiting to hear that.”
Rich thought of his pheasant chicks. “When one of my chicks is being pecked at, after a while, they give up.”
Claire gave him an appraising look. Then she stood up, walked over to his coat closet, and took out a scarf. She wrapped the ends around both of her hands and then walked behind him and wrapped it around his neck. “I want to do an experiment. Try to get away from me.”
9
YOU’RE not going to believe it, but we got a latent off of Owens’s glasses,” Clark Denforth, the head forensic specialist at the state crime lab, told Claire over the phone at work. He was an excitable guy, and he was excited.
“After he was underwater?”
“Yes, and it wasn’t his own print. Checked that right away. Someone who, shall we say, perspires freely. For whatever reason, he had very greasy hands. We got a great, clear print off the lens. And best yet, it was a tented arch.”
Claire knew enough about fingerprints to know that this was one of the rare ones. “That will certainly help in identification.”
“You got anyone for us to look at?”
She paused and thought of Stephanie. “Not yet, but hopefully soon. Wish you could tell sex from a print.”
“I call with great news, and all you can do is complain.”
Claire walked down the hallway to confer with Chief Deputy Sheriff Stewart Swanson, known as Stewy to everyone. He ran the department while the sheriff did the public business. Not that the sheriff didn’t step in, but they seemed to have worked the division of labor out between them and were a good team. Stewy was riding this case with her.
She found him at his desk, looking out the window into the sky. “We’re gonna get some weather.” He continued to stare out the window as if he were hoping to catch the first snowflake that fell from the sky in his gaze.
“Do you feel it in the air?”
“No, heard it on the radio.”
“We could use some snow.”
“What’ve you got?” he asked her.
She told him.
“Great,” he said, “but we have no suspect.”
“We have one, but I don’t think she did it.”
“Who?”
“The girlfriend.”
“Not a bad choice.”
“She’s quite a small woman. I don’t think she could have wrapped that tie around his neck and secured him to the headrest.”
“Adrenaline.”
“Not even with adrenaline. I tried it on a friend, and I couldn’t keep the guy from getting out of the seat and breaking away from me. She’s a lot smaller and a lot weaker than me. I just don’t think she could have done it.”
He was calling her Watkins. This meant it was very serious. She knew he wanted this case solved pronto. The Owenses were well thought of in the county, and winter was a long and hard season even without a murder case dragging everyone down. “Thank you, sir.” If he could be formal, so could she. “I told her to come down to the station so we could fingerprint her. She agreed to do that. Friday, she’s coming in.”
“She said she’d come down?”
“Yes, without hesitation.” Claire continued. “The problem is that her fingerprints legitimately might be all over his car and even on his glasses. They were seeing each other. She’s got the best excuse in the world. She told me that the rag was in his car because she dropped it there. So anyone could have used it to tie him up.”
“You don’t think she killed him.”
“I have no extrasensory perception, but she didn’t act that way to me. She acted like she was thinking about something else.”
“Like what?”
“Like she was thinking about how scared she was of who had killed him.”
“She wouldn’t tell you?”
“I couldn’t get it out of her.”
“Why didn’t you bring her down right then?”
“I didn’t think it was the way to play it. She’s not going anyplace. She’s got the dog. She’s got a good job. She’s established. Let me try to get through to her. I won’t let her slip away. I drive by her house at least twice a day. I’ll keep a good eye on her.”
“I’d say haul her down if it weren’t Thanksgiving.”
When Claire got back to her desk, there was a note telling her to call Dr. Lord. She dialed a strange number and found she had reached him at home. His wife answered and passed the phone to him.
“You’re not working today?”
“My patients are too busy shopping for turkey to come in and see me, which suits me just fine. My wife needed my assistance in making the cranberry sauce. We make quite a bit and put it up for the winter.”
“Organized.”
“I had a thought.” He paused and then went on. “It’s a strange thought, but I decided I should mention it to you.”
“I’m all ears.”
